


i'll tell you all how the story ends: the good guys die, and the bad guys win

by allbluemarauder



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), One Piece
Genre: Crossover: One Piece characters in Danger Days inspired universe, M/M, a lot of swearing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:15:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28760175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allbluemarauder/pseuds/allbluemarauder
Summary: The desert zones surrounding Battery City are ruthless, and when Franky and Chopper are brutally murdered, the gang struggles to deal with it.Alternative universe fic set in the post-apocalyptic future.Sanji fell on his knees next to him and had to cover his own mouth to stop from screaming out in terror. Panicked, he moved his other hand to Zoro’s chest. When he felt the faint and sluggish beating of a heart in there, he lost all composure of himself. He cried so hard it hurt like a stab wound.“He’s alive,” he heard himself sob desperately. “Help me. He’s alive.”
Relationships: Roronoa Zoro/Vinsmoke Sanji
Kudos: 31





	i'll tell you all how the story ends: the good guys die, and the bad guys win

**Author's Note:**

> Don't know what Danger Days is all about? There's a brief summary in the end notes. :)

_They say that-_

_it ain't about all the friends you've made,_

_but the graffiti they write on your grave._

“Look alive, Sunshine! At 109 this is Dr. Death Defying speaking to you from the Zones, oiling your motors for yet another day on the run. You know what they say, a day where you hear no news of untimely deaths is a blessed day. The dust seems to have settled in the tracks of the so-called neo-dracs for now, so as the horizon fades in your rearview, remember those who came before you, the ones whose shrines you pass on your chases. Today-....storm on the-…. you have-....”

The static from the radio muffles Dr. D and Nami glares at Usopp, cramped in the back of Zoro’s shitty old van. 

“I thought you said you would fix that fucking thing,” she snaps, and Usopp frowns, already searching his pockets for a screwdriver or something. 

“I _did_ fix it, if your highness can kindly recall, only yesterday, but it’s a crappy piece of shit and it’s only a matter of time before it dies on its own.”

“Don’t fight,” Luffy orders, from shotgun. “We said we wouldn’t fight.”

Crisis brings out the mature side of him. Nami scowls and crosses her arms, leaning back on the wall of the van.

“Whatever.”

They’ve been out of food for almost three days, and it’s getting to everyone. Luffy’s stomach keeps making thunderous noises every five minutes, which isn’t helping. Zoro’s frown seems to have made home on his face permanently, and Sanji feels more nauseous by the second. Being hungry hits a little close to home. He tries not to think about it, and instead racks his brain for something they can trade for some food. It’s not like they have any carbons left either. 

“Nami,” Sanji starts, on the receiving end of a sharp look already. “I know we’ve looked, but there must be _something_ we can trade. Anything.”

She sighs, and looks around. “This is it, Sanji, I don’t know why everyone seems to think I always have a solution up my damn sleeve. I don’t.”

“Fine. Then we’ll have to fight for it.”

Everyone but Luffy groans. The desert passes by in the little worn plastic window, and between broken signs, stripped-down gas stations and garbage, like fate, Sanji spots a white car. 

“Guys, five o’clock.”

The sight of the white masks in the distance makes Sanji’s pulse speed up. 

“Sanji, for the love of God,” Usopp says, massaging his temples. “You know that if we start shit with someone, even if it’s ND - and I would love nothing more than to ghost those fucking psychos, someone worse is very likely to pick it up on their radars. Then it escalates exponentially, and soon we’re out of ammo, out of gas, the van is trashed, someone gets fucking dusted-”

“I know all this,” Sanji pleads. “But what choice do we have? They took everything from us, we have to start somewhere. They forced our hand.”

He knows they all want revenge, but they talked about it. There’s nothing they can do now that would be _big_ enough, impactful enough, when they have no supplies. They’ll have to lay low for some time, get their strength back, and then hit them where it really, really hurts. Wipe them out. 

So this isn’t revenge, this is just boring old survival.

Usopp shakes his head but readies his sniper gun, and opens up the little hatch in the wall. Luffy has already loaded up with homemade grenades and the few explosives they have left, Zoro’s katana shine dangerously in the sun and Nami’s taser rod is ready at her side. Sanji’s knives are heavy in his hands.

“This is for Chopper and Franky,” Luffy mumbles, as Zoro pushes the van to its limit to catch up with the other car, and an ice-cold silence settles. 

To be fair, from here on out - everything they do will be for them. 

“Get your masks on.”

Sanji smells burning hair before his brain registers the laser beam that nearly killed him. His bangs fall miserably crooked on the right side, and his ear feels warm. He’s so fucking hungry. He catches the look of horror on Zoro’s face for a split second, even visible behind the mask, before he sees that he’s still alive, and cuts his opponent's arm clean off. 

That was too fucking close, and Sanji wastes no time closing the distance, slashing open the ribcage of the shooter with his knife, grabbing his gun, and then shoving him to his knees and executing him on the spot with a blast to the head. It’s brutal but it’s all or nothing at this point, and soon, when the dust is back on the ground where it belongs, he counts heads and is relieved to see all of his crew is still standing. He’s learned not to take that for granted, and wills his heart to slow down. He fought sloppily. He’s too damn hungry.

“Woohoo!” Luffy cheers, and shoots a raygun to the sky a couple of times in celebration. Sanji never understood how Luffy could be so blasé about killing people, but that’s just how he is. And why he’s the best at it. 

Nami is already going through the car, searching for loot, while Usopp looks for parts he can strip. Zoro sits on the sand with his good eye closed, cross-legged, wiping the blood off his katana with the bandana he ties on his head when he fights. All that’s left is for Sanji to pick up the scattered masks from the ground and put them somewhere the Phoenix Witch will find them and bring their souls to peace. Not that the fuckers would have done the same, had this been the other way around, but he does it anyway. 

“Hold on a second, Usopp,” Sanji says, glancing over at him in the setting sun. “Maybe we could use two cars. Getting pretty cramped in the van.”

“Oh yeah!!” Luffy shouts, running over. “That’s perfect, this can be the Luffymobile, the Fear Machine, the Incredible Deathwagon, the Killinator, the Blaster-Beamer, the Bloodsucker, the- Oh! Oh! The Screamer - no that’s lame, the Ghoster, the…”

Luffy’s voice fades as Sanji walks over the dunes, to an old mailbox shrine that seems to have seen better days. Still, there are flowers at its feet, and he can make out the words painted on the front.

_Don’t forget me because I am gone, forget me for I am eternal._

He opens it carefully and places the masks inside. 

“Phoenix,” he mumbles, staring at the featureless white masks, identical to the ones the dracs wear, but blank and bare except for the splattered blood. They make a chill run down his back. 

“If you can hear me… I don’t think these low lives deserve to be at peace. I think they ought to suffer for what they’ve done, and what they choose to believe, because the last thing we need in the Zones is to fight each other. It’s the last fucking thing. And yet, here we are. I’m not proud to have dusted these guys but they had it coming by all means. I’ll do what I have to do, for me, for my friends, for Chopper and Franky. Say hello to them from me, if you can, and say I miss them every day.”

He pauses to keep his voice from shaking. 

“Do what you deem fit with these souls I bring you today. I don’t pretend to know what is right. I trust you.”

He closes the metal door, and gives the mailbox one last look before he heads back to the group. He doesn’t remember when he became the one to deliver the masks - maybe he’s the most merciful of the bunch now. They’ve all changed.

“We should really get going,” Luffy says, already in the passenger seat of the white Toyota. “It’s lucky that we haven’t been spotted by more dracs already.”

“Yeah,” Nami agrees, hauling a bunch of shit into the van. “Let’s go find some food, eh?” 

She and Usopp want to test the Toyota with Luffy, but Sanji feels tired, like he’s aged ten years in the last weeks. A couple of hours in the comfy passenger seat of the van sounds pretty good right about now. Luffy always hogs that spot.

When he gets in, Zoro gives him a sideways look of surprise in spite of himself, before he dims the headlights to avoid being seen, and starts driving. 

He and Zoro have never really been… anything. Friends? Maybe now, but if so it’s second-hand, because they hang out with the same people coincidentally. And sure, Sanji would die to protect anyone in their little crew, including Zoro, but that doesn’t mean anything more than that. They never connected, and seem to have a natural knack for pissing each other off, so most times it’s better not to say anything. After their friends were killed, things changed. In both of them. In the brief window of time where it looked like Zoro wasn’t going to make it, Sanji felt something rawer than he’d felt in a long time. If Zoro _had_ died, right after Franky and Chopper, he wouldn’t have been able to go on. He just wouldn’t.

He can sense that there is something unusual in the air, and realizes how rarely the two of them are alone over an extended period of time. As far as he can remember, it’s the first time since that night.

Zoro’s van rattles over the dirt, and Sanji can feel the hunger in his bones. It’s not even been that long, considering. But Zoro’s stomach audibly hates this as much as Sanji, so at least he’s not alone. The noise makes Zoro smile a crooked little smile, before he turns to Sanji just for a moment. The faint light from the dash makes his eye shine in the night, and he almost looks like someone else. Himself from a long time ago, maybe. Sanji thinks that Zoro must have aged a few years lately too. 

“Can you imagine back in the day, when people could eat all kinds of foods? I wonder what that was like.”

Sanji has dreamed about that many times, and thought of the flavors he would never taste.

“Pretty sure I would kill to go back in time and just eat.”

Zoro smiles again, but looks just as sad as Sanji feels. “Yeah.”

They drive through the night and Sanji almost dozes off a few times, but it’s like something keeps pulling him back every time. Without really meaning to he'll look over at Zoro, sleepily and kind of sneaky through what’s left of his bangs. He seems lost. Not literally, but in a way Sanji’s pretty sure he’s never seen him before. Just a few months ago everything was different, and now they're all stripped down to their barest, skin and bones, empty, echoing shells. 

Zoro keeps playing the same song over and over, and Sanji recognizes it by a word, from a box they found buried in the sand in zone 5 a long time ago, looking for something completely different. Nami had been so disappointed she nearly threw her lighter on it in rage when they found it was nothing valuable. But Zoro had saved it, stubbornly looking through all the shining discs in the sunlight while everyone else got drinks at the All Blue. He seemed to return empty-handed, but Sanji later saw this disc in the van. It was uncolored and ancient-looking, from a time when music was stored on discs like this, and someone had scribbled something on it in haste, almost unreadable. Sanji interpreted it as “Babylon - (Sandy) A”, whatever that meant. The rest was too faded to read. They almost never listened to music in the van, because Usopp, in his infinite wisdom, used to say that the motor needed “all that juice for driving”. But now, Zoro was playing this one song over and over, and it was heartbreaking and haunting at the same time. It was like nothing Sanji had heard before. Most music made in the zones after the Great Fires was loud, angry punk-ish stuff. This was very different. A relic. 

Zoro’s knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

“I’d like to make a stop,” Zoro says quietly, as Sanji is drifting off again. He looks out of the window, and vaguely recognizes a dilapidated sign they pass. _Irw al._ A shiver runs down his spine. He didn’t realize they would be driving through their old neighborhood. 

When they do stop, down the hill from the shrine, Sanji thinks he might crumble to pieces. Zoro takes a deep breath, gets a candle from the back of the van, and heads up. It’s freezing out. Some nights the sky is sprinkled with millions of stars. Now it’s just black and unforgiving, as the unlikely pair make their way to honor their dead friends. 

Sanji feels tears stream down his face and drip down on his jacket, even though he’s been here several times after they put the shrine up. Zoro falls to his knees in the sand, and the silence is heavy as Sanji reaches out and puts a bony hand on top of the mailbox. It smells like paint, still, and none of them can bear to look at the words emblazoned on the front.

_I cannot miss what is forever a part of me._

The box is empty, and when Sanji sees that with his own eyes, it’s like a weight lifts off him. _Thank you, Phoenix._ Their souls are at peace. He hasn’t dared to check the other times.

Zoro lights the candle, and places it by the feet of the mailbox, next to the pictures and burnt down candles from before.

Sanji stands there till he can’t feel his fingers anymore. Then he watches from the car as Zoro stays a while longer, speaking words out in the night that aren’t meant for Sanji’s ears anyway. When Zoro gets back, he gets the CD out of the player, and places it gently in a case. The colorful mailbox blocks the rising sun in Sanji’s vision as they drive away. Chopper would have been sixteen in a few weeks.

“Come in, come in, this is Lu- I mean! Mantella! Heheheh, this is Mantella, seeking, uhhh. Come in would you, I know you’re there. Why did we make the damn names so hard? Zo-”

Luffy is cut off by both Nami and Usopp yelling in the background of the walkie-talkie noise in the van. Sanji throws Zoro a look and shakes his head fondly. Luffy can never remember the names. 

“Right.” Luffy sounds like he’s reading from a list at this point. “To summarize I’m calling: Boom and also... Stargazer. Wait, that can’t be it, why-”

He’s cut off again, this time by just Nami. “Can you- GIVE ME THAT! Sorry about this moron, anyway, are you guys far?”

Zoro checks the old-school radar mounted on the dashboard. 

“This is Boom,” he says, and you can hear in his voice how amusing he finds this. “Reporting. We are just east of Irw-al, full speed towards check fourteen zero. We still headed to Grand for food?”

“Don’t know if it’s safe,” Nami says, sounding wary. “That’s why I, _we,_ were checking in. Dr. D reported some trouble in that area. What’s the second closest location?”

Zoro scratches his chin, and motions for Sanji to unfold the huge map on the dash. 

“Uhh, it seems that Jawa is the closest but we gotta change course for that. You brought your map, right? It’s marked with a JW.”

“I see it,” Usopp confirms, and the sound of a scuffle breaks them off for a few seconds as Luffy no doubt _has_ to look at the map at that exact time. 

“Roger that, we go to Jawa. We’re like an hour ahead of you. Over and out.”

Zoro looks thoughtful when he enters fresh coordinates into the old GPS device. Sanji is starting to understand why Luffy is never allowed to drive the van. 

“We could’ve gone to Reaper,” Zoro mumbles, almost like he’s talking to himself. “But it’s risky. Pretty sure ND has some kind of a base nearby.”

Sanji nods, and folds the map carefully. “That’s fine. No need to tempt fate.”

He stares out at the barren landscape and thinks of Chopper, with his huge book of poisonous and venomous creatures. He sees them all sitting around a fire, sheltered by the van, Franky’s massive truck and the old convertible Nami used to have before it broke down, listening to Chopper pick out code names for them from the book. They had discussed the need for code names after they started getting good, and got more attention from dracs and other enemies, so they could communicate safely. 

They laughed so much that night, and Sanji didn’t even mind the feminine “Stargazer” name when it came from Chopper, who was just barely a teenager back then, grinning at him with childish glee over the fire. It was a romantic-sounding nickname, plus it was from a fish, and Sanji always liked seafood flavors the best. Nami got _Ghost Shark,_ later just “Ghost” for short, Zoro got _Boomslang_ (Boom for short, from a snake), Franky got _Lancehead_ (also a snake), Usopp was _Pitohui_ (Pito for short, toxic bird), Luffy got _Mantella_ (poisonous frog) and Chopper named himself _Vampire Bat,_ which they all thought was hilarious, and went by “Vampire” or “Bat” for short, both of which suited him extremely poorly. No one but Chopper thought these names were cool, but his enthusiasm was infectious, so they let him have his fun. 

When Chopper and Franky were killed, Usopp painted their nicknames on the back of the shrine, in shiny sunset-colored letters. _Tiny Vampire & Blue Lance. _

If someone really wanted to find out their real names it wouldn’t be that hard, especially since Luffy couldn’t remember them to save his own life. But they stuck anyway.

  
  


After the loss of Franky and Chopper, Zoro wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating and heaving for air. When he sleeps he’s brought back to the Thousand Sunny - what used to be their makeshift base out of an old, underground garage. It was the only permanent home he ever had, and the first time Franky brought them there, he instantly felt at peace. It was safe, and to anyone else, it looked like a beaten-down auto shop, with space for just one car. The wall had a huge hole in it, and the area was littered with old rusted barrels marked with the symbol for radioactivity. Therefore it wasn’t a very attractive shelter space, in an area very prone to acid rain, but what Franky revealed to them was a secret elevator, for what had probably been a mechanics dealer in the past. He had fixed the elevator, and modified the space so it was a fully functional operations base. You could drive your car on top of the hidden platform, then ride the elevator down and park underground. It was genius. They lived there for years, had their own rooms, and kept most of their ammo and valuables hidden there. 

It was amazing, but they forgot one of the most essential rules of the zones:

You wanna stay alive? Better keep moving.

In Zoro’s nightmares it was always 3 am, shown on the digital military watch on the dashboard of the control room. For weeks they’d had run-ins with neo-dracs. They just showed up one day, whiter and even more featureless than the dracs, crazier, and less predictable. And to say the least - unconventional. It was only a matter of days after their arrival in the zones that the tales about them reached new, unheard of heights. They burned people alive. They put heads on stakes, as a warning. They had weapons no one had ever seen before.

Dracs could kill you, sure, but these neo-dracs seemed to enjoy the creative process of it. 

Rumors said this was BL/ind’s new project to wipe out all the people living in the zones, once and for all. The dracs and scarecrows were no longer intimidating enough.

Zoro was tired of the whole thing before it even began. And he was on watch that night, staring at the digits on the clock as he heard the sound of the elevator, while Franky’s truck descended as usual. He knew something was wrong immediately, but couldn’t see anything to confirm it. 

“Hey bro!” Franky shouts, echoing through the large space. “You’ll never guess what I saw today-”

Suddenly barrels upon barrels tunnel down in the opening over Franky’s car. That’s what was wrong, Zoro realizes, too late. The hatch roof of the elevator usually makes a sound when it closes, and that never happened. 

“Franky!” he shouts, hitting the big, red alarm button, before he grabs his katana as fast as he can, and rushes out. 

The barrels explode when they hit the floor, in the howl of the alarm, and white smoke starts filling the space. Zoro can hear his friends rushing out, he hears Luffy yell and Sanji swear, and the buzz of Nami’s taser, but they can’t see anyone. 

In the dream it feels like he moves even slower than he knows he did, but it’s like they’re underwater. And in a clearing in the smoke he sees Luffy with his double rayguns, screaming as white silhouettes cut into Franky with long spears from several angles. Zoro runs as fast as his legs can, smoke burning in his eyes, but it’s too late. He slips on the warm blood that’s already covering the floor and almost loses his balance. Sanji is fighting for his life in the outer field of Zoro’s vision, cutting down people left and right, but they’re so many. Their white clothing and masks make them very hard to see in the smoke.

Then Chopper sees Franky, dead in a terrible lump on the floor, and lets out a scream that cuts through even the blaring alarm.

“No, Chopper! Chopper! CHOPPER!” Zoro chokes on the smoke as he tries to stop the scrawny boy from running over to Franky. He manages to grab his wrist, but suddenly strong arms hold him in place and force a blade into his left eye. His grip on Chopper slips. 

He screams in pain and in the split second before he blacks out he sees Chopper, crying over Franky’s body as he’s impaled by at least eight shining spears, over and over and over.

He wakes up every night after that, covered in sweat and sometimes tears. Sometimes Sanji is awake, he’s a light sleeper, and he just sits there, smoking his cigarettes. Not looking at Zoro, as if he doesn’t want him to know that he knows. 

Nami enjoys driving the Toyota because it gives her a temporary purpose. Get the guys from A to B. It’s something to focus on, to keep her mind from wandering too much. However, it still wanders when Usopp and Luffy’s conversations get too boring for her to participate in. 

It hasn’t exactly been a good year. None of Nami’s years have been that great, but that’s not exclusive to her. Everybody suffers in the zones, she’s no different. She knows that. But even so, this has been a particularly awful year. She tries not to think too much about it, because she can’t change anything. She can’t get Chopper or Franky back, she can’t make Sanji smile a real smile again, she can’t give Zoro his full sight back, and she can’t rid the bottomless darkness she sees in all of them. She can’t change how she feels guilty all the time, even though she probably did all she could. 

She still sees Chopper and Franky when she closes her eyes, dead on the concrete floor in a pool of black-looking blood as if the image is etched into her eyelids. She sees Luffy and Usopp screaming, covered in blood as they realize the base is going to explode and they won’t be able to get the bodies out. She sees Sanji fall to his knees in front of Zoro and put one hand over his own mouth and one hand on Zoro’s chest. She sees how hard Sanji cried when he felt his heart beating still.

Those images are just hers to carry now, a terrible burden, but it’s all she has. 

Except for her friends, of course. She still has them.

When Sanji and Zoro finally arrive at Jawa the sun is up, and Nami, Usopp and Luffy can be seen through the windows, eating from a huge tower of Power-Pup cans. Sanji runs the last few meters, and happily joins in. Power-Pup has never tasted so good. Still, he knows they have to ration, they always do. 

“How much did we get?” He asks, almost forgetting his manners and speaking while chewing.

“A hundred and fifty cans,” Nami says blissfully. “There was some stuff in the Toyota that we could trade. I even got some carbons.”

“Nice.” 

“I put some stuff away in the van as well,” Nami continues. “So we’ll see later.”

That amount sounds like a lot, but Sanji knows it really isn’t when divided on five people, and factoring in how Luffy eats three times as much as anyone else if he can. He puts those thoughts away and eats vigorously, though he knows he’ll probably be sick later. It feels healing to sit in a booth with the people he cares most about, while they all enjoy themselves in a rare moment of peace. 

“How was the car?” Zoro asks, and Sanji zones out for a bit while Zoro, Usopp and partly Luffy talk motor and horsepower and mileage. 

Nami looks at him over the table. “Did you stop by?”

She asks in a casual way, but for Sanji who knows Nami better than, perhaps, anyone, it’s clear how loaded that question really is.

“We did,” he says, quietly, to not draw the attention of the others. It’s not like it’s a secret, but he knows Nami appreciates it. “Put down a candle. Everything looked exactly the same.”

She breathes out relieved. 

“I don’t even know exactly what I’m afraid of. I mean, it can’t get any worse for them now.” 

Sanji knows the feeling. He doesn’t share his thoughts on finding that their masks are gone, because to his knowledge, he’s the only one in their group who really believes in that soul stuff. It used to be a universal belief in the zones, but that was a long time ago. It’s fine, they’re all free to believe or not believe what they choose. 

  
  


Zoro wonders silently when it all clicked in his head, when the scrambled Sanji-labeled pieces floating around in his brain finally started to make some kind of fucked up sense. Like he was suddenly able to understand a foreign language.

Maybe it was when he woke up in an unfamiliar room with one eye less, and the first thing he saw was Sanji crying. He’d never seen Sanji cry before, not for anything, and it made his chest tighten up in a strange panic, before he realized _he_ was the reason Sanji was crying in the first place. 

“You fucking… Asshole,” Sanji had spat, almost in a whisper, through clenched teeth while wiping angrily at his face with his shirt sleeve. “Fuck you. I’ll fucking kill you myself next time. Finish the goddamn job.”

Zoro could only stare at the man before him, Sanji, who never as much as flinched at danger or gore or any of the terrible things they’d seen over the years, crying. Because of Zoro, evidently. 

He stared for a second, until the piercing pain in his head made him black out again. 

When he woke up the second time, Sanji was at the back of the crowd, just glaring at him from the furthest corner of the room, as if Zoro almost dying was something he had done just to be a dick. Sanji never spoke of it again, and Zoro sure as hell didn’t ask. He wouldn’t know where to start. He felt strangely guilty, as if he wanted to apologize for it, but he knew if he said anything to Sanji he’d get his head kicked in. 

So, he didn’t know what the reaction was all about. But it shifted something between them.

That couldn’t have been when he realized though, it must have been way before that, because Zoro's been walking around with a lump of coal in his stomach for a long time. 

It might have been as far back as the first time Sanji punched him in the face. They had all been at the All Blue, relaxing after a long day of looting and running from dracs, when a gang of guys had entered. One of them in particular reeked of bad energy, which was confirmed when he made a beeline for Nami, and started feeling her up. She was of course fully capable of defending herself, but Luffy had stepped in before anyone else managed to react. He was always so quick when someone he cared about was in trouble. Sanji was sitting at the edge of his seat, ready to jump in as Luffy beat the living shit out of the guy and two of his friends. Zoro watched him in the corner of his eye. 

When the brawl was over Sanji still looked absolutely livid, and Zoro, for whatever reason, couldn’t leave it alone.

“Aw, sad you couldn’t be the knight in shining armor for once?”

In the moment, he had no fucking clue what possessed him to say that. Or any of the other childish, instigating bullshit he threw at Sanji from time to time.

Sanji didn’t even say anything back, he just moved over to where Zoro was sitting, in the blink of an eye, and clocked him in the mouth with all he had. His whole fucking weight.

It made his ears ring. Zoro pushed himself off the floor, spit blood and looked up at Sanji standing over him, breathing heavy.

“You should learn to think before you speak, you dumbfuck piece of shit,” he’d said, his voice like ice, and it made Zoro’s blood boil even though he _knew_ he was the one in the wrong.

It was the first time it had come to something physical, and Zoro was eighteen. Eighteen and deeply confused. He wanted to punch him back so bad, but Nami interrupted.

“What the fuck are you two idiots fighting about?”

“Nothing at all,” Sanji had replied, all the previous ice gone from his voice. He put his hands in his pockets, and didn’t even glance over at Zoro when he stumbled to his feet.

That’s when Zoro unconsciously realized that this was the closest he would get to Sanji.

Maybe that really was when it all started.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm aware that this is a strange and maybe ambitious crossover, but I had this in my mind for a year now and have to get it out somehow. To me, it seems like a perfect fit.
> 
> If you've never heard of this album- Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance, then a lot of this won't immediately make sense to you.  
> Basically, the album's concept was also developed into a comic series, set in the same universe.  
> If you're lost, you can search terms and other stuff up at a danger days wiki site, such as: https://dangerdays.fandom.com/wiki/Danger_Days_Wiki  
> But if you can't be bothered, here's a brief summary:  
> The world went under. California burned. What's left here is Battery City, ruled by an evil megacorporation called Better Living Industries (BL/ind, for short). You're safe in the city, but everything is controlled. You do what BLi wants you to, when they want you to do it. You take pills that essentially numb your emotions, everything is calculated, no room for nonconformity.  
> People who don't want to live like that might try to escape to the surrounding desert, divided into zones. Here the weather is harsh, food and water is hard to come by, and there are enemies all around.  
> Draculoids (dracs) armed with rayguns sweep the desert to "clean out" any Zone-dwellers. They wear Dracula-esque masks that suck their souls out - they're people before the mask comes on. Scarecrows (S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W/S) are higher ranking and more dangerous than dracs, with more free will but still employed by BL/ind to kill people in the desert. The Phoenix Witch is sort of the grim reaper of this universe, and helps souls move on after death. Power-Pup is canned dog food produced by BL/ind, a common food source in the zones. Dr. Death Defying is a DJ on one of the radio stations in the zones who provides information to his listeners about what is going on.
> 
> Also if there are any Danger Days fans reading this: I've taken a lot of liberties, this isn't supposed to follow canon - only be based on the place and the culture. No characters from the comics, except for Dr. D, he's essential. :)  
> I hope this isn't too confusing, please don't hesitate to ask if something is unclear, I'd be happy to try and explain better.  
> If you leave a comment it will make my day! Thank you for reading! -M


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